


Warping the Loom

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: The Raven and the Reindeer - T. Kingfisher
Genre: Domestic, F/F, Gardens & Gardening, Partnership, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 07:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12294726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: Gerta was correct about most of what happened when they got home: there was a lot of crying, and a feast. Then over the following weeks came the endless retelling of the story that she and Janna had put together with her grandmother, after the first bout of crying was over but before the feast.





	Warping the Loom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evewithanapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/gifts).



> I hope my recipient enjoys the piece!
> 
> Quick note on the title: the process of stringing a loom so that you can begin a new project is called "warping."

Gerta was correct about most of what happened when they got home: there was a lot of crying, and a feast. Then over the following weeks came the endless retelling of the story that she and Janna had put together with her grandmother, after the first bout of crying was over but before the feast.

She had not anticipated how endless the retelling would be, or how quickly she would grow tired of it. She remembered distantly that she had once wanted to stand out. It had pleased her when Kay said she wasn't like other girls; she had made that fact part of the fabric of her being.

Well. Now she really wasn't like other girls, at least not in the village. Even though they didn't mention the part about the Snow Queen, none of the other girls in the village had gone after a missing boy, gone missing themselves for nearly a year, and come back a hero. For that matter, no one else in the village had either. It quickly beat out the story about Olaf, who had saved his wife Anya after she fell through the ice twenty years before.

It was the kind of thing that happened in sagas and stories, not real life.

If the village had been a little smaller, it probably would have been over with soon enough. Everyone would have heard the story the first time at the feast Gerta's grandmother made, and the second through fifth times asking Gerta or her grandmother on the street, and the next few times from each other, and then been thoroughly sick of it by the time the week was out. But the village wasn't quite _that_ small; there were enough people that new ones kept stopping Gerta and asking her to retell it for weeks and weeks, until she discovered – almost to her surprise – that she had a temper and shouted at Hans that _yes,_ it was true and _no_ she didn't want to tell it again, all she had wanted for the past year was to go _home_ and now that she was there she wanted to stop _thinking about it_.

At this point, Mousebones swept up from her shoulder and dove threateningly in the direction of Hans' eyes. The boy rapidly vacated the butcher's yard.

After that, people mostly left her alone, but they stared. That was, in many ways, worse.

Janna bore it all a lot more easily than Gerta, as far as she could tell. Gerta stammered and got details mixed up and had to backtrack. Janna told the story so that it seemed like something out of a story, so Gerta almost didn't recognize it even though she'd been there. Janna was compelling, and pretty, and friendly to everyone, and did not seem the slightest bit bothered that every time she went to run errands for Gerta's grandmother or ran into another hunter checking traps she was asked to tell the story again.

What had started out as one story was morphing rapidly into more like a dozen. People would ask Janna to tell the bit where they escaped the bandits – Janna was supposed to have been another prisoner, along with Gerta – or about the reindeer, once they got tired of the whole thing all at once, and Janna would obligingly come up with another half a dozen details on the spot.

Listening to the part about the reindeer was the worst of it, in Gerta's opinion.

It had been inevitable that they would have to admit magic had been involved; after all, Kay had been taken in the dead of night in a blizzard and left no tracks, and Gerta had found him anyway. Also, she had come back with a talking raven.

But she hadn't wanted to tell them about the reindeer, and Janna had done it anyway, and Janna continued to tell them about it. She made it sound different from how it had been; heroic and honorable, when Gerta mostly remembered how one moment the reindeer had been alive and the next he wasn't, and the blood, and the smell of swinging over herself a hide still full of the bits you normally scraped off when you were processing furs and with the head attached.

“Do you really think,” she started to say after one of the occasions on which Janna had stopped to talk, while Gerta hid awkwardly behind her (this did not work well; Gerta might be shorter than Janna but was rather broader) and was stared at. “I wish you wouldn't tell it like that.”

“How should I tell it?” Janna asked, and took Gerta's hand.

They were both wearing rabbit fur mittens so thick that Gerta could only feel a vague sense of pressure. Consequently it was more like holding their hands  _near_ each other than holding hands, but the gesture was nice.

“I don't know,” she said, and struggled for words to use for the hot, bubbling emotion in her. “It just makes it sound different, from how it was. Like it was a good thing. Tragic, but good. And not so.... messy.” She stopped there, because messy made it sound like she was upset Janna had left out the grossness of it, and that hadn't been what she meant at all.

“I know,” Janna said after a second. “But it's not the kind of story people want to hear, how it really was. And the reindeer helped us, so it _was_ good, in a sense, and if I tell it this way people will remember it and remember him.”

“I guess,” Gerta said, and sighed. Mousebones, sitting on her shoulder and uncharacteristically quiet, preened at her hair and tugged a few strands out of her braids in the process.

“It bothers you,” Janna said. “The attention. I can see why, but I don't know that there's any way of avoiding it. They'd talk more if we didn't tell them something.”

Gerta nodded, and they went on in silence for a few moments.

“It will probably die down by spring, and be a – a favorite story, something they want us to tell them about on holidays, but not what everyone is talking about. And. I can avoid the one about the reindeer, if you want,” Janna said.

Gerta shook her head. “I don't know,” she said, and, “I hope you're right.”

 

She wasn't sure if Janna had said something to her grandmother or her grandmother had noticed it on her own. Either way over the next few weeks, as the spring thaw grew closer, Gerta found that she had dramatically less free time in which to go around being stared at.

First, her grandmother announced that she should resume her lessons at the loom. This might have been fairly painless if she had been better trained before leaving, but as it was she had only just begun, and she had been out of practice for months. There was a lot of frustration and more than a few tears, and once when she dropped one of the heddles on her foot she said a list of words that made Janna look up from her drop spindle and say, “Even  _I_ didn't know a few of those.”

“Those are local,” her grandmother said dryly. “Alright, Gerta?”

“Yes,” she said, face hot, and bent to pick it up again.

At least having Janna around made one part of it easier. Her grandmother had told her she needed to learn to string the warp by herself before, because she could expect to string it herself some day, but since Janna was her own age and her wife and hopefully going to be around indefinitely Gerta was allowed to get her to help. This substantially reduced the time associated with starting a new project, since Gerta could pass – or throw – the ball of yarn to Janna and then take it back instead of having to walk back and forth herself, five to ten paces each direction depending on the size of the cloth, dozens of times before she could start the actual weaving.

Once she was beginning to feel like she had a handle on the weaving she had already learned, and her grandmother was beginning to advance those lessons once more, she thought she could relax; but she was wrong. It was gently pointed out that Gerta's trousseau was only about halfway finished. They had all expected to have more time, such as the year or so she had been gone. Granted, the urgency was less, since as it turned out instead of going off to live with her husband Janna had come to live with Gerta; but there were still things that a new bride should have, and some of them a couple consisting solely of new brides should likely have double of.

(“And since I have no idea how to do needlework, I can't be much help,” Janna said.

“We can fix that,” grimly replied Gerta. She had no intention whatsoever of sewing every article of clothing Janna wore for the rest of her life, merely because Janna had been raised stealing most of what she needed instead of making it.)

There were also the mundane, usual chores, made both thrilling and new and more complicated by the addition of Janna into the household. The stove broke down and Gerta disassembled it and consulted with her grandmother on how to fix it. Meanwhile Janna watched and asked questions about the insides. A week or two later a storm cracked several roof shingles and knocked one loose, resulting in a leak in the kitchen, so Gerta had to climb on the roof on the next clear day to replace it.

(“I feel like I should be doing this,” Janna said.

“Not in the ice when you never have before,” Gerta said. “Just give me a boost.)

The result of it all was that by the time spring came and everyone had too much to do to stare and whisper, Gerta had forgotten entirely to feel overwhelmed by attention. She was instead overwhelmed by all of the things that had to be done. But that was alright; she liked being useful.

 

“Are you sure I'm doing this right?” Janna asked a little doubtfully, kneeling in the soil.

Gerta glanced at her. “The hole should be deeper – by about two or three fingers? Thickness, not length.”

“Oh,” Janna said, blushing, and started again.

“Not like that,” said Mousebones, who seemed to enjoy supervising them from his perch on the edge of the roof. “Deeper.”

“Oh, why don't you just do it yourself,” Janna sniped at him, but – Gerta glanced over – dug the next hole deeper after all.

Gerta's father had had a share in the town's grain fields, but his wife had inherited it instead of his daughter. She brought a section of the wheat to Gerta's mother every harvest, and Gerta's grandmother gave her what she needed in cloth, but that was all Gerta had of the wheat field. It had been assumed that when she married, she would help her husband with his, in between the weaving and spinning and sewing and cooking and thousand other small chores that were mostly handled by women; but of course Janna didn't have a wheat field

What they did have was Gerta's grandmother's garden.

It was a small plot of land in front of the house which bent around the one side that wasn't smack together with Kay's house. Before, Gerta and her grandmother – but mostly Gerta, as both of them got older – had generally planted only the section in the front; now, with another adult, Gerta figured they had better plant the whole thing.

“You had the grape vines before,” Gerta said. “Didn't you?”

“Only the grape vines,” Janna said and sighed. “If we ran out of food in the winter, we hunted and we stole. It wasn't like this. I keep thinking, what if I do something wrong and wreck everything?”

“You won't,” Gerta said, trying to be comforting. “I won't let you. Anyway, if you _did_ there would still be the hunting, and the grain my mother will bring in the fall, and Kay's grandmother would feed us the rest, since we saved Kay. And if we were really in danger of starving, the rest of the town would help.”

She glanced involuntarily towards Kay's house, then, as though she could see through the walls to where Kay was inside. He was no longer as frozen as when they had rescued him – so she heard – but he had taken to avoiding Gerta at some point. In the weeks of story telling and weaving and sewing she had barely noticed, until it was spring and everyone was working outside all of the time. Except that Kay was never out when Gerta was.

“They would?” Janna said, doubtfully.

“They would,” Gerta said firmly. “And you're doing fine, anyway.”

It took them two days to get everything in, and that was by no means the end of it; there would be weeding and fertilizing and tying back, infestations to fight and harvests and storing of harvests. And that was if things went _well_.

Gerta quailed a little thinking of it – and of all the other things that had to be done; the trousseau to finish sewing and the weaving of the cloth – because Janna had no spare clothing and Gerta's didn't fit her right, they had more to do than they should have in one year – and the cooking and the inevitable repairs; and yet some part of her delighted in it. It reminded her of being a reindeer, of the effortless power of springing forward in harness, carrying Janna and Mousebones and the cart. She was needed, and she knew the work was in her power to do, and do well.

She supposed this was what it was like to be an adult instead of a teenager; also there was a sort of vindication in knowing that they had been right, saying she would make a good wife someday.

“Do you ever wish I hadn't come back?” Janna said.

Gerta stumbled out of her daydreams like she had been slapped.

“What?” she said, and, “ _No_. Do you – do you regret coming home with me?” She tried to think what might be wrong. “Grandmother hasn't said anything to you, has she?” Of course she hadn't. “Or someone in town – or is it _me_ \--”

“Gerta,” Janna said, that tired laughter creeping out with her voice, and set a hand on her shoulder. “I haven't changed my mind about you.”

“Then what's wrong?” Gerta asked. She started to hug Janna, then stopped and wiped her hands off on her apron. The result of this was that both her hands _and_ the apron were now dirty.

“I sometimes get the sense I'm in the way,” Janna said, looking at the garden, and Mousebones on the roof, and anywhere but Gerta. “Back when we were traveling, you didn't know what to do sometimes. Or that was what it felt like. I got used to – to being the one who knew how to cope with danger. But here – you and your grandmother have everything handled. I feel like a child again; I never learned half of these things. My parents taught me to – to shoot people, and to bluff, and to fix arrow wounds, when you were learning to fix stoves and grow food and weave. I can handle a drop spindle, but even then I can see how much better your thread is than mine. Mine has lumps through all of it, and it breaks on the loom. And I can barely sew.”

“Janna,” Gerta said helplessly. She gave up on trying to get the dirt out from under her fingernails and hugged her anyway.

Janna's voice had come out cool, and calm, a little dry; but with her pressed against Gerta's chest she could feel that the other girl was trembling. Her breaths came in little hitches, like she was swallowing down the urge to cry.

“No one blames you for any of that,” she said, trying to think of the right words. “I mean, _I_ don't. And – it's not like my husband would have known how to do any of that,” she said, seizing wildly on the first thought that came to mind. “Most of the men go off for half the year or more, for army service or on the fishing boats. Grandmother says five hundred years ago they went off the same way, to raid the southern countries, and drowned themselves the same. There are women here who haven't seen their husbands in five or six _years_ or more. At least you're _here_. And you're willing to learn.”

Janna gave a tiny sniff and flexed her hands on Gerta's arms. Then she said, voice cool and dry as ever, “I cannot quite picture Kay in the army.” By this, Gerta figured she had said the right thing, or at least hadn't said the wrong one.

“Neither can I,” Gerta said. “His parents might claim he's ill – they'll have told the closest garrison he was kidnapped at some point – and they might get away with it. He's always been... odd.” But not bad, she thought furiously. She might not be in love with Kay like she'd thought, but he had still been her best friend for years and years. And hopefully one of these days he would stop avoiding her.

“Anyway,” Gerta said, trying not to think about Kay, “My thread was as bad as yours for years. We'll find something to do with it, same as Grandmother did with mine. And you're a good hunter in the winter, and you can cook. And even if all you could do was lie in bed all day, I'd still love you and we'd still take care of you. That's what you _do_.”

 

It was past the midsummer, when the wheat was tall and swayed in the sunlight and the days were so long that they stayed outside and worked on the porch in the evening light until they were too tired to stay awake. Ingrid's wagon cracked a wheel, the shaft went into the cart horse's shoulder and their daughter came tearing up the path to tell Gerta and her grandmother and most importantly Janna about it.

“--and I thought, you said you were a horseleech back in the coast before those bandits kidnapped you,” she said, puffing. “So would you come? The only horse leech we have around here is the farrier, and he's good but it takes him ages to walk anywhere with his cane and we aren't going to get that mare ten feet down the road, let alone across town, the way she is.”

“I'll come,” Janna said, getting up and setting down her drop spindle with relief. “I mean-” She looked at Gerta and her grandmother. “If it's alright--?” There was a pleading edge to her tone.

“Child, you don't need to ask us,” Gerta's grandmother said, standing a good bit slower. “What will you need for the horse? I'll see if I can get it here.”

Janna looked blank for a moment, like windows of a house abandoned and left open to winter. Then her eyes cleared and she seemed again solid and steady; as steady as when Gerta had first met her. “Sphagnum, and roseroot if you have any here. And clean cloth, for bandages, and water.”

“Gerta, get the water,” her grandmother ordered, starting into the house.

There was a stream in back of the house, close enough that they didn't need to keep large cisterns of it the way some households did. Gerta got the largest of the pots she thought she could easily carry and filled it while her grandmother sorted through the stock of herbs and cloth.

“This way,” Mousebones said, swooping by overhead. “I found them. The horse is thrashing around and kicking anyone who comes near it. If it dies, can I have its eyes?”

“You have to ask its owner,” Gerta said, then horrified, “Don't do that!”

By the time Gerta finished lugging the heavy pot down the road, Janna was already there, approaching the wild-eyed horse slowly, talking softly. Gerta watched her take the mare's bridle. Waiting, heart in her throat, for Janna to be kicked, she instead saw her ease the mare up and out of the shafts.

“Well, she's walking,” Gerta heard Janna said to Ingrid as she got within earshot. “That's a good sign, it means she's got a chance if it doesn't get infected. Gerta! Good, come set the water next to me.”

So Gerta helped hold the mare and sang to her while Janna cleaned the wound and did something incomprehensible with herbs to get the bleeding stopped and stop it from festering. She felt she should have been terrified. Gerta and her grandmother didn't own a horse, and Gerta wasn't the most experienced with them, but she _did_ know that a panicked horse was dangerous to a person. But the mare seemed to trust Janna, and warily Gerta by extension, and no one came out of it hurt except for the horse.

Janna kept that steady confidence all through treating the horse. She was giving Ingrid and her daughter Margareta instructions on changing the poultice when she seemed to falter, glancing nervously at Gerta's grandmother, who had brought the herbs,

“--And we have enough for the first week here for you,” Gerta's grandmother cut in smoothly. “After that if you don't have any near the house, there's a stand in the back of the creek by Hans' place, I'll get Gerta to show you. Janna, I've heard of roseroot being used to treat wounds, but never prepared that way, you'll have to tell me where you learned that.”

Gerta rubbed the mare's nose again and picked up the pot. Trailing after Janna and her grandmother, she heard Janna begin to softly apologize for using up their stash of sphagnum on the horse, with the air of someone who is not at all sorry but afraid of what the consequences are going to be. Her grandmother gently attempted to cut her off and lead her back around to the technique.

A rush of affection for her grandmother went through her, but underneath it was worry for Janna. Through that, there was a vein of appalled curiosity about what, exactly had happened to make Janna so nervous.

“Just an argument with my father, once,” Janna said quietly that night, when Gerta worked up the nerve to ask.

They were in the kitchen, getting ready for sleep. Gerta's grandmother had long since gone to bed in the back room. Gerta was sitting on the trundle, unbraiding her hair and thinking that when the weather got cold she might make a new quilt for the two of them. Janna had been washing her hair from a basin and was now separating it into small sections to rub in some kind of herb rinse she said she needed to make the curls behave.

“About what?” Gerta asked, tugging gently at a knot near her nape, trying to get the last of that braid free. They were all so busy with the harvest that she hadn't bothered to unbraid her hair in nearly a week – she kept being so tired she dropped into bed without even undressing the whole way, and with her already married it hardly mattered that much what she looked like. But as a result of it some of the braid sections had fastened themselves into knots.

“Oh, about waste, and who was a waste, and what the point was in wasting our supplies on some fool we'd just end up shooting for blundering around,” Janna said, and shook her head. A floral scent wafted off her hair with the movement, and Gerta inhaled, closing her eyes involuntarily. “The man who taught me backed me up, said it was for practice, so he didn't whip me after all. But I didn't do it again, so I guess he got his way in the end... Do you want me to help with that? You're going to rip your hair out by the roots, you can't see what you're doing.”

“I hate him,” Gerta said. “Your father. I don't know him, but I hate him.”

Up until this moment she wasn't sure she had known how to hate. No one had ever done her a serious wrong in town, and even Helga had scared her but apparently meant well, and the Snow Queen had been so impersonal and inhuman that hating her seemed about as useful as hating winter.

Janna smiled slightly, wiping her hands off on a towel. “I know. Thank you,” she said, and came to kiss Gerta.

 

The harvest was nearly over and the work had gone from picking and cutting and digging and – for the people with shares of the wheat fields – scything into bottling and drying and stacking in the root cellars. Threshing was nearly finished for the year.

Gerta was sitting on the porch with a ball of string and most of the herb harvest from the garden, cutting and then tying up little bundles to string from the kitchen beams to dry. Janna had gone out to cut wood for another set of racks in the root cellar, and Gerta's grandmother was inside baking bread, which meant that Gerta could focus entirely on the task. It was pleasant work – work she could do sitting down, and which left the scent of herbs on her fingers and her skirt, and the weather was good. But the sprigs had a tendency to slither out if they weren't tied tightly enough.

“Gerta,” Kay said, awkwardly, in front of her.

She jumped and looked up, and felt herself flush. From the look of him, Kay had been standing there for some time, trying to decide what to say, and she hadn't noticed.

“Kay!” she said. “It's nice to see you how have you been come sit down--” She rapidly attempted to clear herbs and bits of twine from the space next to her.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Kay said, slowly and a little stilted, but he sat down when Gerta had retrieved the last bits of plant. “For – saving me. And I'm sorry I didn't want to come with you.”

“She'd enchanted you,” said Gerta, who had had months to think about the whole thing. “It wasn't your fault, not really.”

“It only worked because I let her,” Kay said. “Because I _wanted_ her to; I wanted to go with her. I didn't think that anyone would come after me – that you might get hurt. So I'm sorry about that, and I'm glad you came. I'm glad I didn't die.”

“I'm glad,” Gerta said, voice more heartfelt than she had intended. An awkward silence descended for a few moments.

She remembered that it had always been easier to talk to Kay when they were doing puzzles, spread out all over the floor in his house's kitchen and working side by side. She was a married woman now without as much free time, and it was autumn and not really the time for games, but--

“Do you want to help?” she said, and handed him over a piece of string. “Just tie together a few sprigs like this every handspan or so along the string. Do you have your knife?”

“Okay,” Kay said, and took his knife out.

They worked in silence for a few more moments, but it was comfortable silence; companionable, even.

“Even if I don't want to marry you, I hope we can still be friends,” Gerta said.

“Then you forgive me for all of that?”

“I forgave you ages ago,” Gerta said. “Almost as soon as it happened. But you were avoiding me.”

“I thought you were avoiding me. You didn't leave the house for ages.”

“I guess, but I was avoiding _everyone_ , Kay. Everyone kept asking me to tell them all about it, and everyone stared. And my grandmother said I should finish my trousseau as soon as possible because I'd gotten married without it, and I was sewing from when I got up to when I went to bed. I thought my fingers were about to fall _off_.”

Kay gave a small smile, eyes focused on the dill bundle in his hands. “Then we can be friends. Your wife – her name is Janna, right? I heard about you escaping from the bandits.”

“Janna,” Greta confirmed with relief. “She's from the coast – well, from all over, but she liked living on the coast the best – and she was trained as a horseleech and a healer.”

“Can you tell her I said thank you, too?”

“I will,” Gerta promised. “--How have you been? I mean really? We haven't talked since before _she_ took you, and it's been nearly two years.”

“I've been okay,” Kay said. Gerta waited, patiently, for him to think of what else he wanted to say. Sure enough, two bundles each later: “My mother asked Olaf to teach me to hunt and ice fish, so I might be going out with your wife this year. Since I'm probably not going into the army. Do you ever really _look_ at the ice, when you go out on it in the winter? Last winter, I saw the way the light shines through it--”

Gerta smiled and settled in to listen.

Half an hour later, Janna came up the path with wood over her arm. Mousebones trailed her overhead. “Hey, Gerta,” she called. “Your grandmother said I should get more wood to make us a four poster bed over the winter! Since the trundle's not big enough for two of us – oh, hi,” she said, looking at Kay uncertainly.

“Hi,” Kay said, staring fixedly at his lap.

“It's nice to see you looking alive,” Janna said politely. “Can I sit with you?”

“Go stack the wood and come help us,” Gerta commanded, and looked out at the horizon. Mousebones landed on her shoulder and preened her hair in greeting. Gerta reached up absently to return it.

The weather was still warm for now, and the sun shone, but the first storm would be here soon enough.

They had been home for almost a year, and things, Gerta thought, were finally – not normal. She doubted they would ever really be normal again. But everything was well.

 


End file.
